YouTube gets billion hits per day

"Three years ago today (YouTube co-founder) Steve (Chen) and I stood in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the 'burger kings' of media," read the post, which was titled Y,000,000,000uTube.

"We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organising the world's information (in our case video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. "Today I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you."

Hurley said a key factor behind the site's success was its technology that allowed videos to load and play quickly, and to an open platform that allows anyone with a video camera and internet connection to share their experiences.

"Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site," Hurley wrote.